Windows 2000 Programming from the Ground Up

This is an exellent book. If you have some experience with programming c++(you don't have to be an expert), get this book. After going through some chapters, you will understand the concept of win32 programming, and soon, you will write a professional looking applications. The only thing that I would like to see in this book is how to program network(tcp/ip), but it is still awesome without it. If I could, I would give 10 stars. And before I go, I like to say that the author did really good job. After all, he did graduated from my university. LOL.

This is absolutely one of the best books for learning beginning programming in Win32. Schildt does not waste time explaining programming concepts that you should already know, but instead uses those to teach you how to implement Windows programs starting from the very basic and then moving into more complex, useful applications ( a short coverage of dll's and writing a screensaver come to mind ). Keep in mind that this book does not lend itself toward system programming applications, but more towards GUI based desktop apps. If you are looking to move into a more low level area, such as writing system processes, then I still highly recommend this book as a stepping stone into understanding some of the basic architecture of Windows applications.

I must have spent about $300 looking at books that basically only copy the documentation right from the MSDN library but can't really explain the code in plain English. This book really shed light on the obscure syntax of the API world. Other books as well as the MSDN library assume that you already know the basics. So to all of you, especially the ones wanting to learn programming with MFC, buy this book before you start losing your hair trying to learn Windows programming the hard way.

This book is by far the best on the market for beginning Win32 programmers. I have an extensive Visual Basic background and needed to get up to speed on programming Windows in C/C++. Herb's style of writing is very simple to understand. He explains all of the code in the book in great detail. Although the book does not nearly cover even a majority of the Win32 API, Herb's writing style gets the reader fluent enough in the strange Win32 dialect to allow you to read through MSDN and understand what you are reading.When I had to contact the author to clarify some things, he was always willing to help. Schildt is by far the leader in introductory Windows programming books.

Other '...from the ground up' books from this author have been great. His teaching style and examples showing users how to build complex windows applications have always been easily read by novices. This book- is without a doubt, no exception. It follows the same format as his former books (Win95, Win98), but he explicitely discusses the differences between Windows2000 and Win98 so that anyone can easily distinguish the differences between the two. All of the material taught throughout this book is well and fully explained in plain english. Even some of the more advanced topics introduced in this book are easily explained using the author's interesting teaching techniques. Finally, I believe that this is a great book if any beginner programmers are interested in programming for windows. However, keep in mind that you must have knowledge of C/C++ if you plan to program in Windows. With that I said, I totally reccamend this book to any newbie windows programmer!